In 2022 we purchased a total of 3 tonnes of wool from 7 local farms within 10 miles of our Yorkshire Dales warehouse (see map below). We paid farmers more for their wool – a minimum of £1 a kg, 3 times what they normally get at auction for most breeds – plus we provide them with a share of 10% of the profits made from the project.
This 3 tonnes of wool follows on from the success of the first batch of our local Clapdale Wool that we made into natural undyed yarn from 500kg of wool collected in 2021.
We’ve so far written about the background to our project, gathering the wool, the scouring (cleaning) process, the carding and combing, the spinning of the wool yarn and making this into traceable wool jumpers. All of these products are now available for sale on our website.
The first batch of our Clapdale Wool was made possible through a grant from the Yorkshire Dales National Park Sustainable Development Fund, and this expansion of the project to 3 tonnes was also helped by the Yorkshire Dales National Park where all our farms are based, this time the Farming In Protected Landscapes scheme.
We decided to increase the project from 500kg to 3 tonnes for a variety of reasons: to try and achieve some more economy of scale, to work with more farms, to make a range of colours of yarn, and also to take more of our local ‘Dalesbred’ breed wool.
It’s this last part – use more of our local Dalesbred sheep breed’s wool – that we’ll focus on in this blog post.
The breeds
Our Clapdale Wool project was set up to create a circular economy for wool in this corner of the Dales. We wanted to pay our local farmers enough for their wool to at least cover the cost of shearing and transportation, and hopefully a little more.
We also wanted to work with all the breeds on the fields around our warehouse in the Yorkshire Dales. We didn’t want to just pick the softest breeds but work with the widest range of farms and breeds possible.
In our first year we blended Dalesbred, North of England Mule, Texel and a small amount of Blue Faced Leicester and Teeswater. This was worsted spun into our natural undyed Clapdale yarn. For our second year we used these same sheep for our yarn but left out the small amount of Teeswater as the longer fibre length had caused us some difficulties in the spinning first time around.
To create a yarn soft enough for clothing and knitting we had to put more of the softer breeds into the mix – the Texel, Mule and Blue Faced Leicesters – than the Dalesbred. The Dalesbred is a hardy mountain breed with coarser wool to keep it warm on the fells of Ingleborough.
But we wanted to use more of the Dalesbred so decided to make 50% of our wool (1.5 tonnes) a similar blend as the previous year to be worsted spun into yarn for clothing and knitting, while the other 50% we would use entirely Dalesbred wool (1.5 tonnes of just Dalesbred!) to make into a woollen spun yarn for weaving.
Tweed cloth and blankets don’t need to be as soft as yarn for clothing, so we thought this would be a great way of being able to use this unique Yorkshire breed in bulk.
British Wool
For the first year of our project we collected and sorted the wool ourselves.
However for this second year we were delighted to bring British Wool’s new traceability system on board our Clapdale Wool project. We gave them a list of the local farms we wanted to work with, the breeds we were hoping to get from them and the volumes of each breed needed. They received the wool from each of these farms, either delivered in to their depots or picked up by their lorries and finally put to one side in their huge Bradford warehouse.
Once wool from all seven farms had reached Bradford we popped in and spent a few hours with their skilled sorter picking out all the wool we required.
Farmers are paid for their wool per kg by British Wool according to that year’s auction price for that breed – that includes all the wool we used, and any extra wool that we didn’t require. We then ‘topped’ up this auction price directly to our farmers to ensure they received a minimum of £1 per kg.
We were left with two ‘lots’ of wool – one a blend of all the breeds for turning into yarn for hand knitters and making into knitwear, and one lot of pure 100% Dalesbred breed fleeces. Both these lots were sent to Haworth Scouring in Bradford where they were cleaned in preparation for the carding process – read more about scouring here.
DK yarn in range of dyed colours
Our second year of DK weight yarn – that was made from the half of our wool that was a blend of all the breeds – followed the same path as the previous year. It was combed and carded and then worsted spun.
The difference this year is that with a higher volume of wool we were able to dye some of it, expanding our range to include 5 dyed colours in addition to the natural undyed and hand dyed. This can now be purchased as hand knit DK weight wool and undyed lace weight wool.
We also expanded our range of traceable knitwear, which now includes the Thwaite and Cattlegrid knit jumpers and Aran beanies.
Woollen spun vs Worsted spun
As mentioned in our post about carding and combing our wool for making into our hand knit yarn, we ‘worsted’ spun our blended wool to make it as soft as possible – perfect for hand knitting and knitwear. However this requires an intensive carding, combing and gilling process, which can be more expensive than the alternative, ‘woollen’ spinning.
The above diagram shows “A – woollen spun yarn” at the top. With a less intensive combing and carding process you get a lot fluffier yarn than the below “B – worsted yarn”. Woollen spun yarn is not as soft to touch when used with British Wool because, as you can imagine, having the ends of a fairly coarse wool poking out at your skin (A) is more uncomfortable than the side of the yarn rubbing against it (B). For tweed cloth and blankets however this doesn’t matter as it’s not necessarily an item worn directly next to the skin.
Woollen spinning the yarn for our tweed keeps the costs down a little as we’re not having to take quite as much time to card and comb the wool. This fluffy yarn also produces a lovely rustic tweed and throw – much more akin to the wildness of the area of the Yorkshire Dales it comes from and the mountain breed we are using..
Spinning yarn for weaving
After our 1500kg lot of 100% Dalesbred yarn was scoured we were left with 942kg of scoured wool, as expected we lost about a third during scouring – this was down to the removal or dirt and oils in the unwashed greasy wool.
We spoke to the Yorkshire woollen mill we planned to weave the cloth and blankets with and they specified a maximum thickness of yarn to be able to go through their commercial weaving machines.
This information was passed on to our woollen spinners in Huddersfield as the target thickness. Any thicker than this and we’d have an awful lot of yarn we couldn’t easily do anything with, therefore yarn thickness was all important.
However the Dalesbred breed is not a breed that is used in clothing or tweed, neither the woollen mill or any of the spinners we spoke to had ever used it before in their long history. This was going to be an (expensive) experiment!
Step One
We sent a sample of the scoured 100% Dalesbred Wool to our woollen spinners and from this we realised that the fibre length was too long as it was. We had to add an additional process – cutting.
The scoured yarn was sent from the scourers in Bradford to the factory for cutting, and after that process was complete it was sent on to our woollen spinners in Huddersfield.
Unlike our blended ‘worsted’ spun yarn we’ve made into hanks of hand knit wool, we did not require quite so intensive a carding and combing process to ‘woollen’ spin. We didn’t need to use a separate specialist company but could do the carding, combing and spinning all under one roof.
Step Two
With the newly cut Dalesbred wool back at the spinners they could test spin it and see how we would come up against our desired thickness.
It was at this point we realised that a yarn made from 100% of our Dalesbred breed wool was going to be too coarse for the weaving machines!
We had to blend it with a finer wool in order to get the desired yarn thickness. We bought in a few hundred kilos of wool from the soft Cheviot breed and blended this 68% Dalesbred / 32% Cheviot.
This was never our ideal outcome but an unavoidable challenge we had to overcome. In future years with this in mind, we can look to source a softer local breed to blend with the Dalesbred in order to achieve the required yarn thickness while also maintaining 100% traceability to our local farms.
Adding in Cheviot increased the volume of wool we had from 942kgs to 1376kgs, resulting in far more woollen spun yarn than we had bargained for! Not to mention a higher bill for the spinning of more yarn.
Tweed and Throw Design and Dyeing
All the while that the wool was making its way from a raw fleece to cones of woollen spun yarn we were working hard on preparing the designs for our woven tweed cloth and travel rugs.
We worked with tweed designer Louise Dixon to create a range that incorporated the colours and patterns of the area the sheep graze and reflected the wool itself – it’s texture, it’s origin and the history of the project. Throughout the design process we were also thinking about the volume of each colour we would need to dye and the importance of keeping some undyed wool in every design.
Through a number of iterations we finally settled on 5 travel rug or throw designs and 2 tweed cloth designs. You can see how the CAD designs were reflected in the final tweed cloth and throws – a computer image can be a little different to a woven wool tweed!
When dyeing wool there are minimum quantities required to achieve the best price per KG – about 64kg was the minimum amount of wool we wanted to dye per colour, less than that would make the final woven items more expensive to make than we would like. For example we couldn’t just use a small amount of one colour in one design – as it would mean dyeing less than 64kg of that colour. Each colour used needed to be in more than one of our designs to ensure volume. This use of similar colours also made our designs distinctive but complementary – they look good together as they use the same colour pallet.
You can see how this use of colour affects the process practically with the below table we created for the dyers of our wool. The first table shows how, in collaboration with the weavers, we worked out how much of each colour we would need to produce the desired quantity of each design.
These totals are then fed into the second table which shows the total amount of each colour we would need to dye.
Another consideration when creating our designs was ensuring weaving efficiency where possible. We did this by having the same warp – the vertical fibres held stationary on the loom – for each of our five throw designs. This meant that the entire batch of five different colours could be woven in one go as the warp could be left where it was and just the weft – the horizontal yarn drawn through the warp – needed to be changed for each design.
Weaving
Our dyed woollen spun Dalesbred blend yarn finally made it’s way from the dyers to the mill where it was to be woven to our designs and specification.
The photos and video below were taken about halfway through the weaving process showing the various stages of both our travel rugs and our tweed cloth.
The expertise of the machinists in the mill is an essential part of producing a high quality product. Their decades of experience ensures that each process such as weaving, washing, raising the nap and further finishing is done just right depending on requirements.
Raising the nap
One specific conversation we had on our visit to the mill was the level to which we wanted to ‘raise the nap’ of our travel rugs. The ‘nap’ refers to the raised surface of the woven item. The woven travel rug is passed through a gig-mill or raising machine that uses natural teasels, or similar metal prongs to raise the woollen surface and make it more fluffy.
There is a balance to be had here; raise the nap a lot and you will get a very thick and fluffy travel rug, but at the expense of losing definition of the pattern. Don’t raise the nap enough and you will have a very clear pattern but the travel rug may feel a little thin and more like material than a throw. With the help of the team in the mill we achieved a lovely fluffy travel rug that still clearly displayed the definition on the pattern we had designed.
Labelling
When you’ve spent well over a year on the production of fully traceable woven goods working with seven different specialist factories and suppliers, labelling can be an after-thought! We were very keen however to add the finishing touches to our Dalesbred blend products by adding unique labels and information on where the wool comes from. We adapted our original label used on other ranges of travel rugs, keeping our Glencroft branding but making it clear that this was a different product, of course proudly keeping our Dalesbred sheep prominently in the middle. We then added a swing tag that can be used across all our Clapdale Wool products, showing the seven farms we have worked with.
Final products
The final five travel rug designs are now in stock and can be purchased on our website. We also made four rolls of tweed cloth, a large amount of this has been made locally into flat caps, with some bought to make into suits and even to upholster an armchair out of. We have lots of plans and ideas for more tweed items so watch this space.
500kg still to weave up
We still have over 500kg of undyed woollen spun yarn on cones in storage. The intention is to dye this into the required colours to make more tweed cloth and blankets in the coming months once we see which colours are the most popular. Although this is also available to buy per cone for any weavers looking for a fully traceable British Wool yarn.
Next steps
Follow the journey across our series of blog posts about this unique traceable wool project, from the heart of the Yorkshire Dales.
- Press Release – Glencroft Launches Unique Yorkshire Dales Wool Project With Local Farmers
- Part 1 – Clapdale Wool: Making jumpers from our local Yorkshire sheep
- Part 2 – Clapdale Wool: Scouring, the cleaning process
- Part 3 – Clapdale Wool: Carding and combing
- Part 4 – Clapdale Wool: Spinning
- Part 5 – Clapdale Wool: Making Traceable Knitwear
- Part 6 – Clapdale Wool, Batch 2: Weaving Dalesbred Tweed
